I still remember my first day in Naples, a scene I have never forgotten. Two men stood outside a bar, drinking their coffee standing up, as is customary here, talking about something I could not understand. Their words were lost on me, too fast, too dialectal, too Neapolitan. But their hands told me the whole story. One hand formed itself into a cup shape, rose, then fell again, as if posing an invisible question. The other ran along the chin in a deliberate way, followed by a dismissive flick of the fingers, as if shooing away something tiresome. Not a single word was understood, yet it was perfectly clear what was being discussed: doubt, then impatience, then a decision. In that moment, it became clear to me that Italy operates in two languages . One that is learned in school, and one that can only be understood with the eyes.
This second language is older than most people realize, and far more systematic than a casual glance might suggest. Anyone who wants to understand it must go back, far back, to a time when Naples was still a Greek colony .
A language older than Italian itself
The southern Italian coast was shaped by Greek settlers centuries before the founding of Rome. Naples itself carries that origin in its name, since Neapolis simply means new city in Greek. The oldest Greek colony on the Italian mainland is also located nearby, at Cumae and the Phlegraean Fields west of Naples. The settlers brought not only temples, pottery, and viticulture, but also a culture in which rhetoric and physical expression were inseparably linked. Greek orators were trained to accompany their words with gestures, since a speech delivered without hand movement was considered weak, almost unconvincing. This idea, that language without the body remains incomplete, took root so deeply in southern Italy that its influence persists to this day, even if hardly anyone on the piazza is thinking of Aristotle while using their fingers to suggest a pinch of salt.
When Rome took control of the south, this gestural tradition did not disappear. Instead, it was absorbed and further developed. Roman orators such as Cicero and Quintilian wrote extensively about how hands, fingers, and posture should support a speech. Quintilian devoted a highly detailed chapter of his work on the art of oratory to gesture, describing which hand movement could express which emotion, thought, or intention. Frescoes at Pompeii and Herculaneum, now housed in the Sezione Affreschi of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli , depict figures using precisely the hand positions that can still be observed on the streets of the city today. Two millennia separate those images from the present, and yet certain gestures look as though they were invented only yesterday.
Why gestures survived while empires fell
One might assume that such an ancient tradition would have faded with the end of antiquity. The opposite is true. During the Middle Ages, when southern Italy was ruled by Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, and later Spaniards, the spoken language remained unstable as authority changed hands constantly and dialects evolved independently in narrow valleys and isolated coastal towns. In a region where a neighbor in the next village over spoke a barely intelligible idiom, the gesture became something reliable. It survived conquests, language shifts, and centuries of political fragmentation, because it answered to no grammar and no ruler. A sign for money remained a sign for money, whether the language spoken at court was Catalan, Neapolitan, or Latin.
This is precisely why gestures came to play such a central role in southern Italy while elsewhere in Europe they became more of a secondary concern. The fragmentation of the Italian peninsula, which did not achieve political unity until 1861, meant that a Neapolitan and a Milanese could barely communicate in speech, while a hand sign was immediately understood. The gesture became the unofficial shared language of a country that officially did not yet have one.
Naples as the capital of the silent language
Among all the Italian regions, Campania, and Naples in particular, is still regarded as the center of this form of expression. This is due not only to the long Greek and Roman prehistory, but also to the distinctive social structure of the city. For centuries, Naples was one of the most densely populated and at the same time poorest metropolises in Europe, with narrow alleywayswhere life took place in the street rather than behind closed doors. When people live in such close quarters, where windows give way to balconies and balconies become improvised marketplaces , a form of communication develops that works across distance, above noise, and beyond linguistic boundaries. A mother calling down from her third-floor window to her son in the street below, telling him to bring home bread, often needs no words at all, just a hand movement that everyone in the alley understands immediately.
This density of meaning packed into movement fascinated, in the nineteenth century, a man whose name remains inseparably linked to the Neapolitan language of gesture: Andrea de Jorio.
The canon who catalogued the gestures
Andrea de Jorio was a priest, archaeologist, and museum curator in Naples, a man who dedicated his life to the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum. While leading tours through the museum, he repeatedly noticed how helpful it was to explain ancient vase paintings to foreign visitors by pointing to gestures he himself observed every day on the streets of Naples. This observation gave rise, in 1832, to his work La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano, roughly translated as The Mimicry of the Ancients, Investigated Through Neapolitan Gesture. It was the very first systematic study to describe gestures not as a curiosity but as an independent, rule-governed system of communication, complete with its own grammar, its own rhetoric, and its own context.
In his book, De Jorio documented dozens of gestures, accompanied by elaborate illustrations showing how Neapolitans spoke with one another in daily life, and paired these images with depictions from ancient Greek and Roman art in order to demonstrate a continuity spanning more than two thousand years . After its publication, his work fell into near obscurity for over a century before being rediscovered by gesture researchers such as Adam Kendon and translated into English. Today it is considered the founding text of an entire field of study devoted to nonverbal communication.
The language that bridges all dialects
What De Jorio observed in the 19th century still holds true, in modified form, to this day. Italy counts, depending on how one measures, well over a dozen regional languages, some of which differ from one another as much as Spanish and Portuguese. A Sicilian and a resident of South Tyrol would barely understand each other in their respective dialects. Gesture, on the other hand, with regional nuances, remains largely intelligible from Palermo to Turin. It functions as something of a second, informal national languagethat no one officially decreed, yet every child learns long before being able to read, simply by watching at the kitchen table, at the market, and on television.
Precisely because it is so deeply rooted in daily life, it tends to be underestimated, both by Italians themselves, for whom it has long since become second nature, and by visitors, who mostly perceive it as nothing more than a folkloristic cliché. In reality, it constitutes a communication system with its own precision. Some gestures express pure emotion: impatience, astonishment, menace. Others convey concrete messages that can be translated almost literally, such as a request for patience, a question about money, or a warning about deception. And still others have become so casual that they are used unconsciously alongside spoken language, without the speaker even being aware of it.
A legacy that lives on in cinema
Italian cinema, too, has never ignored this language. From Federico Fellini, who staged his characters with an almost dance-like gestural quality, to contemporary productions such as the series Gomorra, which portrays the raw Naples of today, gesture serves as an independent narrative device. Directors understand that a single hand movement often reveals more about a character than an entire line of dialogue, precisely because the audience reads this language intuitively, even without ever having consciously learned it. This interplay between cinema and gesture will be explored in depth in a dedicated installment of this series.
Svitlana and Bastian Glumm at the seaside, on one of their many research trips through Italy. Their new life in Pozzuoli is set to begin in 2026.
Why this series
For me personally, this story is more than a curious detail of Italian culture. During my previous stays in Campania, this silent language has been present at every turn, at the market, in conversations with neighbors, in every brief exchange at the bar. Starting in October, I will be living in Pozzuoli myself, and I am curious to discover how familiar these gestures will feel in everyday life. Anyone who truly wants to understand Italy cannot afford to overlook this language, because it tells more about Greek rhetoric, Roman oratory, centuries of political fragmentation, and Neapolitan daily life than most language courses ever could.
In the upcoming installments of this series, the ten best-known Italian gestures will be examined in detail, along with those Neapolitan peculiarities that cause confusion even in northern Italy, the signs one would be wise never to use when hoping to avoid giving offense, and finally those moments in Italian cinema where a single hand movement carries an entire scene.
